eurydicebound

I read American Gods today.

Honestly, I had started a few days ago. I read bits here, and bits there, and skimmed though on five minute chunks of time until I had dallied away a hundred pages or so. It was a fitting beginning, perhps, not unlike the book's protagonist's initiation. The book itself I found on sale, unwanted, in a bargain shelf of a local small chain bookstore. It was a first printing, and $5.00. I'd wanted it since I first heard of it, but hadn't seen it yet where I could afford it. This one copy seemed to be waiting for me, though, so I took it home.

I did not read it.

Instead, I threw myself into work, skimming and scraping together words and letters that fell from the pens of other writers, hoping to get enough together to turn them into enough money to make it through just a bit longer. I wrote some as well, but mostly with borrowed words and phrases and ideas. I spent my time recasting the shadows that others have thrown, cleaning up the rough edges and inventing new shadows to dance with theirs, all on the same backdrop, or else took the measure of those shadows and placed them out for public use.

A year and or more passed.

I looked back at the book now and again, and joked that it sat accusingly on its shelf, whispering guilty messages to me in my idle moments. In truth, it did nothing of the sort. It simply waited. It waited while my life fell to ruin, the blocks I had carefully stacked around me scattered across the floor. It waited while I stacked them up again, in lieu of anything better. It waited while I learned to step beyond them and stand alone, without a flimsy wall of blocks to "protect" me from the wolves outside. I met them, and though they bared their teeth and ripped my skin, they cannot kill me. We have since learned to live together in an uneasy truce, the wolves and I.

None of this has anything to do with the book.

Tonight, after a day of missed appointments and ill feeling and disappointments all around, I spent a little time on my work and a bit more time on my children. Once the games were finished, I looked to the television, but there was nothing for me there. Instead, I read the book. Really read it, I mean. I dove in, ignoring everything, stepping away from the pale imitation of reading I had previously engaged in and drowned myself in words, and gods, and a dark uneasy land that lives by its own reckoning, where the stars fall and people walk in their place.

I finished about a half hour ago. Strangely, it is not Shadow and his ilk in my head... at least not as Gaiman presents them. It is my own story that flashes behind my eyes and makes the world seem strange and far away and symbolic. My own dreams are tumbling in the shadows around me, demanding their own words, their own stories be told. I can see them in the shape of cloth on my bed, feel them standing behind me, hear them in the odd heartbeat of my computer, a whirring thump-thump it has taken on, letting me know that it too lives on the words I give to it. There aren't a half-dozen people in the world who can feed me this inspiration, who set my own dreams flying instead of theirs. Gaiman is one. Should he happen to ever read these words, I thank him. I owe him that, at least.

I cannot take the time yet, but I will, and soon. I know now that they will not wait much longer. Their slumber is done and spring is here, and I finally have words enough to write.